


there's no we in us.

by ohioinmymind



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Frottage, Kissing, M/M, OT3 Feel, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-27
Updated: 2014-05-27
Packaged: 2018-01-26 19:57:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1700621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohioinmymind/pseuds/ohioinmymind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Just be careful.”</p><p>“Of what?” Zayn can’t be anymore cautious with his heart than he’s already been. </p><p>“Liam is easy to fall in love with,” she says, and Zayn wonders when she got those wise lines around her eyes. He’s never noticed the tired tilt of her mouth. “But he’s not easy to love.”</p><p>Songfic to Sam Smith's "Leave Your Lover".</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's no we in us.

**Author's Note:**

> Songfic to Sam Smith's "Leave Your Lover". 
> 
> All rights to lyrics and mentioned persons belong to artists and people themselves. No copyright intended. 
> 
> Yada yada, I changed the last line of the song to make it feel right? To make it fit. 
> 
> OT3 warning, ziam+eleanor, but it's ziam to the core, so. no OT3 sex or anything like that. just close friendships. 
> 
> Special thanks to Brandon and Hana, mwah, love you guys. And as always, thanks to Cody for believing in me.

**_I don’t have much to give, but I don’t care for gold._ **

**_What use is money, when you need someone to hold?_ **

“Let’s go out tonight,” she says, like they have more money in their wallets and less bills on the bar. Like Zayn’s not wearing shoes with no soles and Liam’s not lying by his side with dust on his skin, in his hair, and under his fingernails from working at Lumber and Load for minimum wage. Eleanor doesn’t see that. “I know, I know you’re gonna say we can’t. We _can._ ”

Eleanor doesn’t see what she doesn’t want to, and that’s lovely.

Luckily for her, Liam is in love with her smile. Zayn gets a look, a look that says _what won’t we do for this girl_ , before Zayn’s left alone on _their_ bed in _their_ apartment while _they_ share a hug and a kiss and a laugh, and maybe a cigarette on their way to the powder room, to get ready for a night that will cost them a week in the dark and a considerable amount of candles.

Zayn sits there for several moments before Eleanor comes back for him, grabs him by the hand and dances her fingers up his arm. “You’re coming out with us, you know?”

“Didn’t realize I was invited,” Zayn says, and he’s ashamed that he looks away from her with a shy lip stuck in his mouth; Zayn is not bashful with red cheeks and fluttering eyelashes. “But yeah, I could do a night out, I guess.”

He’s dressed already, because he has a flat on the other side of town with a wide television and curtains not made from bedroom sheets. It’s not much, but it’s not this. It’s not a mustard couch from a yard sale and a rug from the dumpster three streets over. It’s also not golden light on a girl with auburn hair and a smile that makes Zayn feel less alone. His apartment doesn’t have room for Liam to bend over and pick Zayn up with his hands on the outside of his thighs, spinning him around until they’re both dizzy on motion and boxed wine. Zayn’s flat doesn’t have a myriad of heels on the floor or work boots in the closet.

“Of course you’re invited, silly.” Eleanor draws Zayn in close, like she doesn’t know how hard it is not to be allowed to kiss the space between the bow of her lips and the bridge of her nose. She drags cheap press-on nails over the bones of his cheeks, and when he breathes Zayn can feel her in his lungs. “What would we do without you, Zayn? What would we be without you?”

She kisses him, because she’s allowed to do whatever she wants, and then her mouth is opening around the sound of her laugh and she drags herself away. Eleanor shucks her shirt, doesn’t care that Zayn is looking and can see all of her – wouldn’t be the first time, they’re so intertwined. Her innocence does not fool him, Zayn tells her to run along and join Liam for his shower; he’s got work in the morning.

Zayn listens to them; tries not to let the harmony of their giggles penetrate the steel of armor he’s built around himself. He’s not sure if it works, Zayn will go ahead and say that it doesn’t. When their laughs become quiet and they still haven’t made it out of the shower, Zayn bids a good night to the yellow hue of their sofa and writes a note of excuse.

_What would we be without you?_

From the looks of it, he thinks, hearing Eleanor gasp through the paper material of their walls, just fine.

He goes home alone, and tries not to take it personally when no one comes looking for him.

****

**_Don’t have direction, I’m just rolling down this road_ **

**_Waiting for you to bring me in from out the cold_ **

****

“Don’t think you’ve gotten out of this,” are the words Liam uses to get buzzed into Zayn’s building. He can’t see him, but he doesn’t need a visual to hear Liam smiling – it’s in his voice and his register and the way he pauses before letting Zayn know he’ll wait out there all day.

Zayn knows that’s true, that Liam won’t move from that spot until he’s gotten what he came for – an apology or explanation, whichever is easier to coerce over the period of a smoke break.

That’s how he’s sitting next to Liam on his own couch, which is teal and antique and not all that different from the one in Eleanor and Liam’s apartment, this one is just purposely worn. Zayn wonders when he grew accustomed to things that only looked broken on the outside.

Liam is heat, Zayn’s fingers stick to the sheen of sweat sewn into his skin when they hug, and his thigh is too warm against Zayn’s leg when they squeeze onto the same seat. His stare is too hot for Zayn to look at directly. Zayn tries not to melt.

“This couch isn’t comfortable for shit,” Liam says, and Zayn tries not to laugh at how he holds his cigarette. Liam looks around like he’s never been to Zayn’s apartment, like they haven’t spent a night wrapped in grey sheets on the floor three feet from where they’re sitting. Liam remembers things he only wants to remember. “I missed you last night. We missed you.”

That’s a lie, or maybe it’s not. Zayn tries to tell himself he doesn’t care.

“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” he answers, because sometimes Zayn is an asshole.

But Liam responds with eyes that are too kind for Zayn to deal with, because he knows that Zayn is only ever a jerk when he’s hurting, and Liam’s an expert in fixing everything that’s wrong with Zayn. “Tell me what’s on your mind? Without being a jackass about it?”

He emphasizes the last part with a hand to Zayn’s thigh, fingers squeezing until Zayn is taking back his cigarette and brushing dust from the wrinkles of Liam’s knuckles. “I was out of it. Don’t really know how to be around the two of you anymore. It’s been three years, yeah. Think I’d be used to it, but it - sometimes it gets too strong.” _Inhale, exhale, don’t look to your left._ “Even for me.”

Liam is subtle, doesn’t grab Zayn or kiss his ear, just moves his fingers back and forth on the inseam of Zayn’s trousers and hums to himself until he’s singing around a cigarette he never passes back in Zayn’s direction once he gets it. Zayn doesn’t know what it means when Liam never responds in words, just sits there while Zayn’s hand covers his own and they’ve burned through half a pack of Marlboro Lights.

They meld together as the seconds pass, watch the sky turn orange and pink and then grey because the nights come fast in London. Liam doesn’t move when Zayn falls to his side, just scoots closer and sings under his breath while Zayn wonders what it would be like to taste filtered smoke on the silken lining inside of Liam’s cheeks. He folds his legs to his chest, Zayn does, because he’s comfortable with Liam on this uncomfortable couch.

Liam kisses Zayn’s knuckles because he’s a gentleman, and they fold their fingers together because they’re a perfect fit. “Come out with us, tomorrow morning. Put on your best clothes, don’t pretend you’re poor just for us. We want to live like we’re supposed to.”

“Who says you’re not supposed to live in a modest flat with honest jobs?”

Liam snorts, “Eleanor’s dream journal.”

Zayn doesn’t say anything until he’s started thinking about the pulse in Liam’s neck, how it would taste and feel jumping and racing under the press of his lips. He says something then, because he needs Liam to go before he realizes how much Zayn wants him to stay. “I’ll meet you by the steps in the morning.”

“I think I’ll sleep here tonight.” Liam stretches his legs, toes his boots off his feet while Zayn looks in the dark for words to make Liam just go. He can see Zayn thinking, and that’s a terrifying thought to revisit later, but right now Liam’s pressing one digit to Zayn’s lips and lining laying him back on the couch. “I just want to make sure you don’t go anywhere, okay?”

Zayn laughs only out of lack of options. “That’s stupid, where am I going to go? Not rich enough to skip town when I please.”

Liam lies beside him like it isn’t a big deal, like Zayn’s heart isn’t challenging him to jump out of his chest. And perhaps it isn’t, but when you’re twenty-one and falling in love, your whole world is on fire. What he doesn’t expect is fingers at his temples, tapping while Liam assaults him with deep, dark, questioning eyes at a high proximity. “I meant up here. Your mind is so – _beautiful_ , beautiful and crazy – that I think you get lost sometimes. I don’t wanna lose you tonight. Don’t wanna lose you, ever.”

Liam smells like wood and grains and inexpensive cologne that Eleanor buys at the corner market, he smells like that usually.

When Zayn makes room for Liam beside him that night, lets himself cram into the small space of Liam arms with Liam legs around him while they laugh out loud when their chins bump, Liam just smells like _home._

****

**_You’ll never know the endless night, the rhyming of the rain_ **

**_Or how it feels to fall behind and watch you call his name_ **

****

Dark wood walls, and pianos that don’t play as good as they look. Women in underwear that covers their bellybutton and not their bums, Eleanor loves clubs.

She’d dressed herself in clothes that still have tags on them, ones that will stay in her closet because Liam doesn’t have the heart to take her around the shops tomorrow and give them all back. She leaves red lipstick marks when she kisses them, which is exuberantly and often, because national landmarks make her cheerful and American tourists make her laugh.

Zayn likes to think he looks dapper, in a crisp shirt and a jacket that Liam could pawn to pay his rent. His shoes don’t shine, because they’re suede and they pinch his toes. Liam’s shirt is atrociously printed and floral – but his pants are pressed, and the real estate agent believes that they’re all well off when they ask to look at a two story walk up on 5th and a mansion of Grand Avenue.

They live the life that they think they deserve.

It’s all laughs and hugs, and at one point Zayn carries both Liam and Eleanor on his back at separate times during the day. They’ve snapped pictures they’ve taken a million times, but it’s been months and Eleanor is bored and Zayn doesn’t feel like he’s drowning when Liam’s patting him on the back and Eleanor’s holding his hand.

But the sun has gone down and Eleanor’s feet are tired of trotting around the city in stockings and a trench coat. She’s let her hair down, and Zayn and Liam both agree that it’s a shame she didn’t do it before – she’s beautiful in the sun. Eleanor laughed at them and lead them to _Shirley’s_ , checked their coats at the door and let their eyes adjust to the dark before thrusting them in a room full of topless women and cigar smoke.

She lets her hair down and kicks of her shoes, and Zayn thinks this might be better.

“Come dance with me,” she says, and Zayn doesn’t know that they let guests dance on the poles designated for the dancers, but he sure hopes they make an exception. Eleanor’s fingers wiggle at the end of her wrist, and Liam drags Zayn up there long enough for Eleanor to wrap her arms around his waist so Liam can disappear for drinks. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Do you come here often,” Zayn asks with his hands high on her back, because he loves her skin and her eyelashes and the ridge of her nose, but he’s also respectful. He knows that she’s carried a flask around with her all day, she likes the juice a little too much (“It makes stuff easier to take in, all the bullshit, you know?” That’s what she says.). But right now, Zayn thinks she’s drunk on life, filled to the brim and spilling over while she dances between a steel pole and Zayn’s chest. “And if so, does Liam know?”

It’s supposed to be a joke.

But Eleanor stops too fast, and Zayn thinks too much, and it ruins everything when she smiles at him and kisses the side of his mouth. “Liam doesn’t know everything that I do, Zayn.” He tries not to throw his head back at the feel of her nails near the back of his scalp, massaging and scratching and making him feel _so good._ She holds them together, face to face and chest to chest. “Liam doesn’t have to know.”

Zayn kisses her forehead and laughs when her lips tickle his throat. He doesn’t say anything to her when she tells him how much she loves him, because Eleanor loves everyone. Eleanor loves her mom and she loves Liam, she loves Carrie Bradshaw and the lady that lends her coins at the laundry mat. Zayn takes his drink when Liam arrives with it, then he sits at Eleanor’s feet and kisses her knee. Because he can, and because he feels like it.

Zayn and Liam share a dance later on, when Eleanor is too pleased with her self to notice. When the music slows and their foreheads can touch. Liam holds onto the pleats in Zayn’s shirt and wipes away the lipstick around his mouth with a wet thumb. They laugh, because that’s what you do when you’re in love with someone who is fun and crazy and when you don’t make enough money to buy Christian Louboutin pumps and Tom Ford suits – you laugh.

They walk home hand in hand, Zayn gives more piggyback rides.

“Liam! Hurry up, Liam!” Zayn shuffles behind them the closer they get to the apartment they share. He’s invited up, _of course of course of course_ , but he stays a step behind and watches them be the couple he forgets they are sometimes. It’s so weird not to share, not to know who he’s jealous of or who he really wants, it’s odd to be two plus one and not three.

All of them lie on the same bed, Zayn drags his fingers over Eleanor’s spine and pretends he doesn’t see Liam lifting her into the midnight air when he closes his eyes. 

****

**_Pack and leave everything, don’t you see what I can bring?_ **

**_Can’t keep this beating heart at bay_ **

**_Set my midnight terror free, I will give you all of me_ **

**_Leave your lover, leave him for me_ **

Inspiration is fickle when Zayn feels like his lungs are lined with lint. Everything he paints is grey when he avoids Eleanor’s phone calls for three days, and he can’t write sentences that don’t sound like _I miss you_ when he ignores Liam throwing stones at his walkup all morning on Thursday. Things don’t start to make sense again until he rings them up, comes carrying wine that doesn’t taste like grape juice and glasses that don’t have dust in them.

“You think Château de Whatever is going to make me forget you haven’t talked to me in four days?” Liam isn’t as easy to appease as Eleanor, but he drinks just the same. Zayn sews his lips shut with strings of regret and remorse and tries to act like his cigarette doesn’t taste like shit with a four hundred dollar bottle of wine.

“I think that I have other things to do, can’t pal around with you guys all the time. Art doesn’t make itself,” Zayn says, and it’s a lie. Art makes itself, it draws and writes and paints itself and Zayn is angry that the muse inside his fingers only works when Eleanor is biting her lip. When Liam is walking through his apartment with boxers on his skinny waist. “Look, I’m not trying to be an asshole—”

“You’re doing a well shite job of it.”

Liam is hard lines and unrelenting shoulders, he doesn’t melt in Zayn’s hands or around his words, sits on his bed with crossed legs and drinks with tempered eyes. Eleanor has painted her face at eight in the evening, fine stokes of foundation, and gloss that makes it appear she’s licked her lips one too many times. The wings around her eyes are black and uneven and Zayn doesn’t think it’s possible for her to look more beautiful than she does when she comes to Zayn’s rescue.

“He doesn’t have to explain himself to us, Liam.” Her fingers grab for the bottle, pulling Liam along with it when he won’t let go. The smack of their kisses isn’t unusual or out of place. Zayn doesn’t bother looking away when Eleanor soothes her thumb over the crease of Liam’s forehead, thinks that maybe he likes the pain it makes him feel. One kiss, one more, and one on the crest of purple moons stamped underneath Liam’s eyes, and Eleanor is sinking to the floor near Zayn’s feet. “I’m just glad he’s back. Don’t want you to leave again. Liam’s cranky when you’re off by yourself. Irritates too easily.”

That doesn’t mean anything, means less when Liam stands up with strong knees and a tired face. Zayn will say he tried to look away, and he’ll know that it’s a lie. Liam dismisses them with a casual hand, makes them feel three inches tall and about as important. “Well you can sit here and chug his lame excuses down your throat. I’ve got to meet Louis at the pub.”

“You’ve been meeting Louis an awful lot.”

This is none of Zayn’s business. He’s not supposed to know how Eleanor’s collarbones protrude when she’s annoyed at Liam’s behavior. It’s not Zayn’s place to recognize the jittery tap in Liam’s left leg when he’s stopped listening to Eleanor list her concerns. Zayn’s not supposed to know that he doesn’t exist right now, can’t tell Liam to come off it. Why would you crawl the bar with your lads when you have a beautiful woman with mismatched socks and tiny freckles waiting for you in your apartment? He can’t tell Eleanor to let Liam have this one, can’t tell her that he’s going to explode once he gets out the door because he would never raise his voice at any woman, especially not one that has his heart.

Zayn doesn’t have a place in their relationship disputes, because he doesn’t have a place in their relationship.

“I’m not allowed to grab a drink with Louis, now? ‘Cause you’ve got mascara on and Zayn’s decided we exist again?” Liam shakes in place, and Zayn thinks he’s being ridiculous. It was four days, five at max. And his words don’t match his face, the poison Liam spits doesn’t match the rose of his cheeks or the brown of his eyes. “I’ve gotta go, El. I just – I can’t deal with it, I have to get out of here.”

Don’t take it personal, Zayn thinks. Don’t let your skin crawl where he can see, don’t let Liam know how it feels to be detested by someone you would rip your heart out of your chest for. This Liam, high-strung and red and foreign, this Liam doesn’t get to see you shrink back into the mustard of this stupid couch and rub your eyes with the ball of your palm.

“Zayn just got here,” is Eleanor’s final try and Zayn kind of wants to weep for her. Cry out to her, _open your eyes._

“Can’t pal around with him all the time, I’ve got other friends to see.”

Eleanor isn’t too pretty to be sad, because women have a right to be sad and happy and angry at life. Her mascara tracks down her cheeks in rivers that run into the dip of her chin and just never stop. Zayn tries to keep his hands steady as they cradle her, finger through her hair and snag on gentle tangles in a sea of unplanned waves.

Tomorrow he will forget the whispers she seeps into his chest. “It’s always like that,” she lies, because Zayn knows that Liam never gets mad over nothing – gets tired of not _being_ enough like Eleanor gets tired of not _having_ enough. She allows Zayn the luxury of scaring away cold tears with the heat of his thumb. “It’s worse when you’re away. He doesn’t – _we_ don’t know how to be us without you. I don’t know if we’ll make it to forever. Forever is too long to be lonely.”

 _I would never leave you lonely,_ Zayn almost says. Eleanor’s got this thing for fairytales, is the princess of her own world as well and Liam’s, and Zayn’s as long as he’s breathing. Forever means forever to her, don’t spend your nights with someone you wouldn’t lie old in the dirt with – love as long as you can, as much as you can. Zayn firmly believes that she doesn’t need a knight to carry her into the sunset, just needs one to walk beside her. Wants to hold someone’s hand when she feels the last of the sun on her skin.

Zayn doesn’t tell her that he could be that person – that he would never look back if she loved him a fraction as much as he loved her. He won’t feel scorned, because he doesn’t deserve her gratitude for his affection.

But he will be sad with her, because he knows how it feels to love someone who leaves you lonely.

****

**_We sit in bars and raise our drinks to getting old_ **

**_Oh, I’m in love with you and you will never know_ **

****

Liam comes around the next morning, takes Eleanor from Zayn’s tired arms and they laugh with jolts of false hope in their shoulders. Zayn has never seen this, has never seen them pretend to be okay. Liam’s birthday is today, they didn’t forget, things were just so crazy.

In honor of this special occasion, they both pretend that Liam doesn’t have long scratches down his back when he shucks his shirt to lie between them. Scratches he didn’t leave them with. They indulge him with hugs and cigarettes and kisses to the chin, and when he’s sleeping Zayn watches Eleanor lead her fingers down the trail of someone else’s passion left of Liam’s skin.

They sleep for hours, until the sky is grey and then grey again, only darker this time. The moon hangs in the place of the sun.

When Zayn is helping Liam button his shirt up to his sternum, he gets the attention he waits for. Liam is Liam, not mad or angry or cruel in the way he turns away from Eleanor when she walks past. His fingers settle into the grooves of Zayn’s hipbones, and his heart beats a bruise into Zayn’s back when Liam lines himself against him.

“I’m sorry you had to see this,” he says to Zayn, like Zayn doesn’t know that not everything lasts – even Eleanor and Liam. Maybe he didn’t. “I’m sorry we couldn’t be better for you. You deserve better than us.” Zayn wants to say _no, no I don’t._ But Liam’s face is resting in the crook of Zayn’s neck, breath dewing the branches of Zayn’s collarbone, and his hands link together over the butterflies in Zayn’s stomach. “I haven’t been the man I want to be for a long time.”

Zayn knows exactly what pressures mold Liam into a gem, knows that the hard work and long hours and loud laughter makes him beautiful and special and everything Zayn wants to hold in his hands. But manual labor and minimum paychecks also makes him callous, days without breaks to sleep and rest and enjoy what little he’s bought for himself makes Liam resent the choices he made to get to this place, and the over-happiness does well to hide all of this, but it won’t hold out forever.

Nothing lasts forever.

Zayn wants to say _I love you,_ but his throat closes around each syllable until he’s letting Liam down and not saying anything. He lets his head relax on top of Liam’s, a reassurance of something – he just doesn’t know what.

Liam’s sigh shakes them both, moves from one body to the other until Liam’s plucking Zayn’s hands from his sides and holding them like they’re more precious than they are. Like they do something more than paint and draw and type, like they created the moon and the sun and the stars in the sky. “You don’t have to say anything, just wanted you to know I love you.” Liam’s chest caves behind Zayn’s back, like this is hard for him to admit, as if the words were strung together carefully before they were delivered. “Whatever happens, I love you, Zayn.”

He doesn’t. Liam doesn’t love Zayn like Zayn loves Liam. He doesn’t dream about Zayn’s hands or wish he could dance his lips along the bend of Zayn’s spine. That’s Zayn, that’s Zayn, that’s Zayn. Liam loves Zayn like he loves ice cream, or being off on Sundays. It doesn’t burn the same, doesn’t hurt as much or reap as many rewards. Liam is Zayn’s muse; Eleanor is too, because he loves them. He can draw the pink pout of Liam’s lips and write about the colors he finds in Eleanor’s hair.

You can live without ice cream, you cannot live without air.

He opens his mouth to tell Liam this, that it’s not the same, but he’s stuck in place by the heat in Liam’s eyes when he finally starts paying attention. They’ve had drinks while they dressed themselves, Eleanor is taking the longest, locked in the bathroom with makeup brushes and catchy music. Liam’s not drunk, but his eyes droop, they’re dilated and Zayn thinks he might be able to see the world in them.

He’s not sure what he’s supposed to do while he’s being turned around, not sure where to put his hands when they’re backtracking to the front door because Liam is haunting him with precarious footsteps forward and Zayn is trying to _run._ He’s scared. There’s no protocol he’s read yet on how to react when a man with dark eyes and wide hands is fisting his hands in the fabric of your shirt without words.

“I’m gonna kiss you,” is breathed across the plain of Zayn’s cheeks, said while he’s standing with his heart in his throat and his knees bumping into one another.

“You’ve kissed me before,” that’s what Zayn says, tries to bring them back to Earth where things make sense and Liam’s not looking at him like he’s holding the gold in his hands. He shakes his head, if only to free himself from Liam’s eyes. “I mean, you have. Doesn’t have to be different, I don’t think. Kiss is a kiss.”

“I’ve never kissed you like this.” It comes hard, it’s a crash of one body into another, and Zayn feels like he’s been swallowed by a black hole – his world has come to an end, because he doesn’t know how to survive Liam’s lips fully on his own or his thumb in the crease of Zayn’s chin. Liam moves backwards when Zayn doesn’t move, stops breathing completely. Their noses still touch, and Liam’s speaking directly into Zayn’s open mouth. “Tell me you love me, Zayn. Would you do that? Let me hear it from you, that you love me and I’m not being stupid?”

Zayn doesn’t speak, because his body doesn’t work on command anymore, he’s not programmed to respond to hearing the only thing his ears were made to listen for. What Zayn wants is not what he gets, and he’s not sure of all the stakes. Liam could be drunk or high or playing with Zayn like a toy, one he’ll throw away.

Zayn doesn’t want to be thrown away.

When the words don’t come out, Liam steps Zayn into a wall, and Zayn watches Liam close his eyes and take a leap. He connects their mouths again, seals them together and moves his hands along Zayn’s spine. He hoists Zayn by the hips, while Zayn’s busy taking his chance, utilizing his opportunity in sloppy, wet kisses and slides of his tongue while Liam secures Zayn’s weight against something steady. Zayn cries into Liam’s mouth, the picture on the wall stabbing him in the back while Liam spans sure hands up Zayn’s shirt and across his back.

“Shh,” Liam mouths, planting his nose into the crook of Zayn’s neck and rolling his hips forward before he has to catch Zayn’s mouth to quiet him again, all the friction going to his cock when he tightens his legs around Liam’s waist. The music pounds around them, Eleanor’s singing makes them move faster and harder, makes Zayn kiss Liam’s closed eyelids and sink his nails into the flesh of Liam’s neck while he rides the fireworks of Liam’s hands on his skin. “Quiet, we have to be – move your hips again, fuck, _fuck_ – we have to be quiet.”

Liam presses Zayn farther into the wall, hoists his own weight on an elbow while he jogs long fingers through the shot strands of Zayn’s hair. They kiss for a long time, hungry tongues and bitten moans while they try to line themselves up and make the knot in their stomachs go away. Zayn’s leg falls and Liam picks it up, hand wrapping around the outside of Zayn’s thigh and tugging him forward, harder harder _harder_ , until Zayn’s erupting stilted moans and sighs into Liam’s mouth.

“I want to make love to you,” leaves Zayn on his high, almost makes him come again in his trousers while Liam pumps against him, keeping him in place while he moves his hips up into the crease of Zayn’s ass. “One day. Now I just want – _god_ – just want to fuck you.”

They could finally meet, and Zayn imagines the sounds that would come from the stinging slap of skin on skin if they didn’t have layers of clothes between them. He can feel Liam, can feel his cock standing up at his belly, hard and red and moving back and forth while Zayn tries to help Liam get off. He uses his legs to follow the rhythm Liam’s created, hoisting himself up and down while Liam fucks up into him with both hands buried into the flesh of his waist.

He feels Liam pulse, does them a favor and eats the groan that comes out of his mouth, presses their open lips together until Liam’s pulse has stopped drumming against Zayn’s fingers.

Climbing up to the top is always more appealing than the trip down.

Zayn unwraps himself from Liam, and he feels dirty, can hear Eleanor – beautiful and innocent and wonderful Eleanor – one room away singing while she blow dries her hair. Zayn thinks of how it looked, to see her trace lines of Liam’s infidelity with the end of her nail and his shoulders sag under the guilt.

He doesn’t want to be that guy.

“Do you love me?” Liam tortures Zayn with that question, hangs it over his head while they still stand so close.

Of course I do, he wants to say. Instead he says, “Where you not present for the past five minutes?”

Because sometimes Zayn is an asshole.

Liam’s eyes search for lies and truths and regrets along Zayn’s face, and he doesn’t know that Liam finds, just knows that it’s not what he was looking for. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

It should, though. Liam should have seen it, felt it. In the careful way Zayn touched him, in the way he drug his nails into the canvas of Liam’s skin to leave his signature. When Zayn touched his lips along the wings of Liam’s eyelashes, he should have heard him whisper I love you in the back of his throat. Liam should have heard it in the moans he emptied into Liam’s mouth. It was there, Liam just wasn’t looking.

“You don’t, do you?” Liam shakes his head, and Zayn doesn’t stop him. Zayn makes art with the words he aligns with his head, not the ones that come from his mouth. Liam runs away from Zayn, steps back slow and careful with his hands raking through his hair. “I’m an idiot. An idiot.”

_You’re not, you’re not._

Zayn doesn’t say anything, doesn’t tell Liam _happy birthday_ or _I love you_ , just moves through the apartment until his feet find the front door. Eleanor deserves better than this, so does Liam.

He hangs his head all the way home, Zayn does.

He crawls in bed that night, knowing he’s not the man he wants to be.

****

**_But if I can’t have you, I’ll walk this life alone_ **

**_Spare the rising storm, and let the rivers flow_ **

****

They go their separate ways two months later. Liam offers to move out, to stay with Louis or Zayn or across town at his mother’s, but Eleanor insists that she could use the change. By change she means making a new home in Zayn’s apartment with a box of porcelain trinkets and three trunks of clothes from the thrift up the street.

New starts apparently mean new clothes, and Zayn should be excited.

He is not.

Eleanor’s met a nice boy with gelled hair and soft hands, and they don’t do anything but have tea all day while Zayn paints in the kitchen. Zayn feels dirty every time he looks at Liam, so he keeps himself locked in his apartment where Liam won’t show up. Not while Eleanor is here, not while they’re still trying to figure out how to be just friends again. 

Everything Zayn paints is red and orange and a mess of flesh and lips, but there’s too much passion on the canvas. When he sits down to write, it makes him hard in his jeans, makes him shift and fidget until Eleanor asks him with her kind eyes what is the matter. He hasn’t drawn her chin in a month, has stopped trying to catch her in the light, and doesn’t bother himself with creating a palette that will transfer her alabaster shades onto stretched hide.

The matter at hand, is he’s fallen out of love, stopped looking at Eleanor and wanting her to be his, instead wants her to be happy. Zayn needs to see her giggle into the arms of a man who calls himself Aaron, needs to know she’s safe and content across the hall from him. The way he loves her doesn’t burn a hole through his chest anymore.

So when she does it again, asks him the next night and the night after that, _what’s the matter?_

“I kissed Liam,” is the only way he knows how to explain his recent artistic fascination with cupid’s bows and the color pink.

Eleanor turns her head, looks at him strangely before perching herself on the end of his desk. “We’ve both kissed Liam, sweetie.”

Zayn doesn’t think it’s transferring, and he hates how he can look at her now without getting weak in the knees, hates that love is fickle enough to make kisses and claw marks divert his heart from one person to another. Both of his hands move in gestures that he’s sure neither one of them understand. “No, I _kissed_ Liam. We uh, we _did stuff_ together. I’m really – I’m sorry, El.”

He’s ready for her to erupt, braves himself for the storm that’s—apparently not coming. Her shoulders shake with the bursts of her amusement, and she’s grabbing him by the hinges of his jaw, kissing the end of his nose as if his admittance of betrayal never took place. “Zayn, I know you and Liam have had sex before. You’re not telling me anything I didn’t know. Anything I wasn’t okay with.”

“We’ve never had sex.” Almost, but not quite.

Zayn doesn’t have to look very hard to spot the surprise on her face, it’s open and honest and shocked. She moves back, waltzing her self out the door as quiet and gracefully as she came in, leveling him with a look when she reaches the oak of the doorjamb. “Well then, t’s a shame you haven’t. I love Liam, but I haven’t been in love with him since—since ever. Real love works, if I was in love with him I would have stayed. Sex between friends is still just sex, Zayn. If you want to kiss Liam again, be my guest.”

Nothing is that simple, nothing is that easy.

“You paint him like you never painted me. If he’s that gorgeous in your mind after one kiss, then I’d encourage you to go all the way.”

He’s the owner of lips that don’t move and a heart that moves too fast, because there are no words that he can pull out of the air right now that don’t make him sound like a fool. “Thanks, I think? No, yeah. Thank you.”

Zayn has never claimed to be eloquent.

With pause she considers Zayn with careful eyes and the warmest of smiles. “Just be careful.”

“Of what?” Zayn can’t be anymore cautious with his heart than he’s already been.

“Liam is easy to fall in love with,” she says, and Zayn wonders when she got those wise lines around her eyes. He’s never noticed the tired tilt of her mouth. “But he’s not easy to love.”

**///**

“Fancy seeing you here,” is Liam’s way of answering the door. He steps aside to allow Zayn inside, and the air isn’t as tense as it should be. Liam takes Zayn’s coat, because he’s being nice and proper, and he offers Zayn a seat on a tan pleather couch. Zayn immediately misses the feel of mustard corduroy underneath the tips of his fingers. “I see I finally got visitation rights,” Liam addresses Zayn with eyes that don’t seem hard enough to remember their last encounter. On the wall right in front of them—the picture is still lying dusty and cracked on the floor. “How’ve you been, man? Feels like it’s been ages.”

That’s because it has.

The sky is dark, and Zayn hopes that Liam doesn’t squint his eyes and see the flush of uncertainty brushed along the tops of Zayn’s cheeks. Liam calls him over, makes him leave the couch and walk five more steps until they’ve reached the bed Zayn’s sat on a million times. It feels different.

“I’m doing good,” he lies, watching Liam move around the room for pointless tasks—turning on the television, closing the window, bringing Zayn a soda, putting on a sweater—until Zayn has to shackle his fingers around Liam’s wrist and tug him to a seat. “I would be better if you would sit down and look at me, I think. I think that might make me feel better. If I knew you didn’t hate me.”

Liam attention is grabbed then, and Zayn brawls the urge to smack himself in the face. That was a stupid thing to say, such a dumb thing to bring up, but it didn’t stop him and now Liam looks appalled. Pale-faced and stricken, Liam’s fingers light Zayn ablaze with feathered touches underneath his jaw. Zayn’s eyes close with peach-hued embarrassment, and he squeezes them shut when the pad of Liam’s thumb strokes careful lines underneath Zayn’s lashes. “Open your eyes, please.”

Zayn shakes his head, petulant and determined not to see Liam looking upset when he peels his eyelids back. “I’d rather not, thanks.”

Zayn’s never stood atop a mountain with whispers of wind across his face, has never heard the secrets of nature in the air that grazes around him while his heart drums along to the sway of the grass. But he thinks this is what it feels like, right now. Liam exhaling slow and steady with Zayn’s face in his hands. He can feel Liam’s heartbeat in his thumbs, tries to align it with the patter in his own chest.

Zayn wonders if Liam still thinks he’s in love with the broken man he holds in his hands. He wonders, yeah.

“If that’s how you want to play it then,” is not the proper warning for a kiss, but Liam’s never been astute or abiding of moulds other people create. They’re very still, noses pressed together with an unflattering scrunch. He’ll never grow tired of the pressure of Liam’s lips lined with his own, never in his life. His eyes open, and the ends of their lashes meet in a soft, brief tangle while Liam looks at Zayn with an unbroken smile. “There you are.”

“Here I am,” Zayn responds, because he feels like they’re in a novel and he wants their story to write well.

Mouth still fallen open, slick from a nervous swipe of his tongue, Zayn tries to close his eyes again. It doesn’t work though, Liam caresses the warmth high on Zayn’s cheeks until his eyes are opening again, sore from looking at his subject too closely. They share space, with Liam on his knees between the room of Zayn’s trembling thighs, even so when he retreats far enough for their noses to point like they’re meant to, they’re close enough for their mouths to touch if their breaths are too shallow.

“I missed you,” comes as a pant from Liam’s mouth, and Zayn hates that he’s melting at the upward curve of someone’s lips. “I miss both of you, but Eleanor will come around. Give her a wad of cash and shoes that shine, she’ll be your friend. I thought I might have lost you. Can’t afford to lose you.”

“Just needed time to think,” Zayn says.

“I didn’t mean it,” breaks Zayn’s heart. “I mean, I _do_ love you. ‘Course I do. But not in that way.” Liam can’t hear it as he speaks, can’t hear Zayn’s world creak as it spins off it’s axis, doesn’t hear his heart cry, or his soul turn out the lights on its way back into the darkness. “I scared you off, and I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to make you leave, okay? I don’t love you.”

“You don’t love me,” Zayn asks, he needs to be sure. He doesn’t want to see it, so his eyes flutter shut before he can see the honesty in Liam’s face. “You don’t love me?”

“I don’t love you.”

Liam doesn’t love Zayn. He doesn’t love Zayn.

The sky is pink on Zayn’s walk home. The sidewalk is grey, and the birds sing haunting tunes in the trees.

Roses are red, violets are blue, and Liam doesn’t love Zayn.

****

**_You’ll never know the endless nights, the rhyming of the rain_ **

**_Or how it feels to fall behind and watch you call his name_ **

****

“You can’t stay in bed for until you’re old and grey,” Eleanor tugs on Zayn’s arm, pulls him out of his mattress until he’s a useless heap of bones on the floor. She worries about him, it’s present in the way she stares and coddles, makes his tea stronger when Liam comes over for a chat. (They can be in the same room now, Liam and Eleanor.) “You can’t help me pack for Aaron’s if you’re curled in a ball of tears and sheets.”

Off the cliff and into love she’s fallen again, Eleanor is making her own mark on the world again with a boy that is not Zayn or Liam. He punishes himself with bourbon for missing his chance to love her like she deserves, hates that someone beat him to it. But Zayn knows that if she wasn’t the sole thought on his mind, he wasn’t worthy of her time. Zayn is happy that Eleanor found someone to center her world around; the sting of being left alone in his apartment again is overridden by the joy in helping a wonderful girl continue living a wonderful life.

“I haven’t been crying, I’ve been _resting,_ ” is Zayn’s excuse. Liam’s due for another visit, it’s been twelve hours since they’ve seen each other. Now his time is split evenly between work and Zayn and Eleanor and Louis. Louis is a new addition that makes Zayn’s head hurt, but Liam is smiling more than he used to, so who cares if that leaves Zayn’s pillow wet in the morning? He’s moving on, moving on. “Go check again to make sure you’ve got all your clothes, even the ones that made their way to my closet. And the jumpers behind the art studio. I have to meet Liam for lunch and then we’ll get you into Aaron’s apartment, promise.”

He forgets that in knowing someone well, they also know you. Eleanor reads the slump in his shoulders and the remnants of no sleep under his eyes. Her hands smell like lotion and chalk when she pats his face. “I told you it wouldn’t be easy.”

“Considering you have enough clothes furnish a small country, trust me, I believed you when you said moving you out wasn’t going to be easy.” Deflect, deflect, deflect. He’s an artist, so he paints a beautiful smile and stands on his feet, moving out of reach. “Got to jump in the shower, I won’t take long.”

The problem though, with fake smiles, is that anyone who has ever had to wear one can see right through yours. “Liam loved you for a long time, and I didn’t think you would ever see it. You broke his heart while you thought he was breaking yours. Please don’t be sad about that, Zayn. Please don’t let heartbreak keep you alone.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sometimes the one you want, Zayn, is _not_ the one you need.”

Eleanor is beyond her years, speaks in lines of books she’s read or songs she’s heard. Lives a life she wants to write down on a page when she’s old and tired of running. Zayn listens because he’s stayed still for so long, and he wants to know how to move forward.

Zayn cancels his lunch and paints. He paints while Eleanor moves her boxes and when Liam knocks on his door. He writes in detail how his heart broke. There’s charcoal on the sides of his hands and on the dip of his chin when he looks in the mirror.

Afterwards he looks at it all, and he smiles.

Now that there’s an outline - portraits, words, and paintings - of how he had his great fall, maybe Zayn can put himself together again.

****

**_Pack up and leave everything, don’t you see what I can bring_ **

**_Can’t keep this beating heart at bay_ **

**_Set my midnight terror free, I will give you all of me_ **

**_Just leave your lover, leave him for me_ **

****

Six months and three apartments later, Zayn is back in town. He’s got an opening at a gala on the nicer side of town, and he’s bought himself a scarf to wear to the event. There are cracks in the creases of his knuckles, and he still thinks of sawdust sprinkled on his couch on Sunday afternoons, but it doesn’t hurt. Zayn can pass a lumber yard without weeping and kiss a girl with red lipstick without feeling a hole in his chest.

The birds still haunt him, but there tunes make his steps lighter. When girls with rich, brown hair pass him, he smiles at them. Zayn met David Beckham last month and called Liam to tell him how much they really do look alike, and he didn’t choke once during the thirty-seven minutes they stayed on the phone.

(“I miss you,” he said to Zayn. Five months and no words from either of them. “Do you miss me?”

What a silly question.

“Yeah.”

“I feel bad about how we—you just left. When you come back, maybe we could—”

“I don’t miss you that much.”

It wasn’t a lie.)

He mails a letter to Eleanor once he’s in town, goes to Aaron’s apartment and learns she’s gone to Rome with a man named Patrick. Zayn hopes she falls in love, forever this time.  

It was bound to happen, running into his large hands and wide smile. Zayn just didn’t think Liam would be focusing them on someone else, someone that’s not Louis or Eleanor or him. It’s a window he’s sees them through, and Liam leans across the table to cup the cheek of a man with high cheeks and curly hair.

Zayn thinks that should be him, thinks if he stayed it could have been. Wonders how long he would have been able to hold Liam in his hands before he slipped through his fingers. To love everyone you meet, it’s a rare occurrence, but Zayn knows Liam’s heart is big enough for the job. He stands in the middle of the hustle on the street, watches Liam be careful and gentle and loving to a man he probably just met. It surprises Zayn, that when they kiss, when Liam catches the lips of someone that is not him, that his heart doesn’t burst into flames or stop beating all together.

He could call Liam right now, take his phone out of his pocket and watch him run until Zayn got to feel Liam’s weight against his chest.

Zayn doesn’t do that.

He knows how it feels to love someone who leaves you lonely, knows how it feels to love Liam. There isn’t an enemy that Zayn would wish that pain upon, not one person he can think of.

His feet are moving, and he’s walking into their diner.

He could do it, he could do it. Wave at him, call him to attention. Kiss him and hug him, breathe his neck to see if he still smells like cheap cologne and dust. See if Liam still reminds him of _home_ after all this time.

Zayn points them out to a waiter, gives her the two largest bills in his wallet. He pays for their dinner and walks the rest of the way to his showing.

Because sometimes the one you want, is in fact, not the one you need.

 

**_Don’t leave your lover, not if it’s for me_ **

 

 _2+1≠3_ by Zayn Malik is a huge success.

 

**Author's Note:**

> sooooooorry, tell me what you thought or how much you hate me. you guys know i live off angst. 
> 
>  
> 
> [find me on tumblr.](ittybittymickeys.tumblr.com)


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